Black Peacemakers In A Global Perspective By Bill Fletcher, Jr.

Good afternoon and thank you for inviting me to speak with you today.

 

We gather on the eve of the 40^th anniversary of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King. This is a moment when, across this country, there is renewed reflection on the life and work of Dr. King. One area that will more than likely gain little attention is that of foreign policy and international affairs.

 

One year before his assassination, as we know, Dr. King denounced the US involvement in Vietnam. He had intimated his disagreement with US foreign policy for some time, but this was an open, public break with the Johnson Administration. It was additionally noteworthy because it signified a moment when King was attempting to unite the struggles for racial justice, economic justice (as exemplified by the Poor People's Campaign and his support for unionization) and what we would now call global justice.

 

The response that King received upon criticizing the US war of aggression in Indochina, and his subsequent criticisms of the US role overseas in general, brought forth the wrath of both liberals and conservatives. I would dare say that it was much the same as Rev. Wright has recently received, and Senator Obama then received, as a result of his relationship with Rev. Wright. But there was another angle here that was important to note. It was the explicit denunciation of King for being involved in foreign policy at all! King was attacked by the mainstream media for being involved in things he allegedly knew nothing of. He was attacked for going outside of the Civil Rights box. There was absolute fury that this brilliant leader of the Black Freedom Movement would dare to comment upon anything that went beyond the issues of race and civil rights. King, of course, believed that it was all linked together.

 

King's intervention into foreign policy should not have been perceived as unusual. The fact of the matter is that African Americans have consistently spoken out on matters of foreign policy, going back at least to the 1830s-1840s with the Negro Convention Movement (further back if one considers our opposition to the slave trade). In the Negro Convention Movements one found not only the demands to end slavery, but, indeed, the support for the Irish national liberation struggle against Britain!

 

African American involvement in foreign affairs certainly did not end there. Garvey's support of the Russian Revolution and Irish independence; the Pan African Congress movements; opposition to the US occupation of Haiti; opposition to Italy's invasion of Ethiopia; support for the Spanish Republican cause against General Franco's fascists, and their German and Italian allies; the Council on African Affairs and its call for majority rule in India and South Africa...the list can go on and on. And these were not simply causes raised by the Black Left, but in many cases were issues that resonated among masses of African Americans.

 

King's venture into foreign affairs (and later that of Rev. Jesse Jackson) were neither accidental nor adventurist, but were entirely consistent with our history and struggle. In order to understand that it is important to understand that we are an international people. We are the result of slavery and the amalgamation of various African ethnic groups, and later Native Americans and sometimes whites. We are the product of an experience in the USA and the development of capitalism. Our oppression was entirely linked not only to the slave trade but to the eventual colonization of Africa, Latin America and indeed, much of Asia. This linkage was not oppression in general, but a white supremacist oppression that suggested that, quite literally, billions of people were by definition inferior and that this inferiority justified their colonial/subordinate status.

 

Despite, or perhaps precisely because of this common bond, the racialized capitalism of the USA has done all that it can to separate the African American experience from the experiences of others who suffer national oppression and colonialism. At each point we are sent these particularly paradoxical messages: one, that we are "Americans," that is we are part of this social formation called the United States of America. Two, that we are not really Americans, but exist in a sort of twilight zone. Our experiences, we are told, are so unique as to differentiate us from others around the globe. Yet we are not similar enough to white Americans so as to guarantee any degree of real equality.

 

During much of the 20^th century many of our efforts to build international bonds were undermined by anti-communism. This was particularly true after World War II, with the Council on African Affairs being a prime example. With the death of Franklin Roosevelt and the decision by Britain and the USA to launch the Cold War, the USA became a peculiar ally of the colonial powers in undermining or attempting to undermine most national liberation movements. If not undermine, I would say co-opt. National liberation movements had significant numbers of communists and other leftists playing substantial and leading roles. The USA saw this as a threat to its imperial ambitions and did all that it could demonize these movements and anyone who supported them. Despite the efforts by many of these movements-including Communist-led movements such as the Viet Minh in Vietnam-to reach an accommodation with the USA, successive US administrations went into attack mode.

 

Part of the attack mode was aimed at creating barriers between us in the USA and these movements. This was especially the case when it came to African Americans. Efforts, such as those by the CAA, were condemned as communist-inspired and subversive for advocating Indian independence and Black majority rule in South Africa. The level of fear that this created made it increasingly difficult to have anything approaching a sophisticated and rational discussion of anti-colonialism and independence. Instead, we witnessed a retreat into the cocoon of the race-in-the-USA paradigm, for lack of a better term.

 

Yet within Black America, there remained a current that was internationalist. This internationalism derived from many sources, but it sought-through this internationalism-to build ties, if not alliances, with others who were fighting white supremacy and imperialism. In some cases, we tended to romanticize various movements and buy into myths. In other cases, we developed very sophisticated analyses of various situations. In either case, segments of Black America struggled intensely to place our struggle for freedom in a broader context.

 

Malcolm X, of course, in the 1960s elevated our struggle in a way that it had not been elevated since the late 1940s, when, in breaking with the Nation of Islam, he sought to understand the dynamics of the national liberation struggles sweeping the planet. In these national liberation struggles he saw millions mobilizing against imperialism, but also against white supremacy. He was hopeful of a new world coming into being.

 

He was also observing stark parallels between these struggles and our own struggle here in the USA. As a people, Malcolm recognized, we have never been a part of the so-called American Dream or melting pot. Indeed, we have seen the underside of the American Dream, and if we are in the melting pot, we are that which is caked to the bottom of the pot. Malcolm realized that this experience or existence was directly tied to something that went beyond the denial of constitutional rights, but was tied to our existence as a specially oppressed people and the consistent denial of our demand for true freedom that came with this status. For this reason he insisted that our struggle was one for human rights.

 

Let us go further, though. Malcolm, and later King, recognized and dared to suggest that our freedom could not take place in the center of a superpower if the interaction of the USA with the rest of the world did not, itself, change. King, in the final two years of his life, said this very clearly, insisting that we could not have civil rights in the USA if the USA was engaged in criminal behavior overseas.

 

US history teaches us that at any moment that an African American comes to such conclusions, s/he is treated as a danger to the established system. This does not mean that each African American leader who has spoken out on international affairs gets taken down, but there is a clear tendency to attempt to marginalize, if not outright mock, those significant African American leaders and organizations who speak out about things other than race.

 

In the 1980s we saw this again with the attacks on Rev. Jackson. When he went into Syria to secure the release of a downed US pilot, he was not taken seriously. His views on various world situations, particularly Palestine, were ridiculed by most of the mainstream media as if to say that he not only did not know what he was talking about but that he did not have the right to say it!

 

What is missed, when this sort of thought-repression unfolds, is that African Americans tend to see the world differently than do most white Americans. Again, I do not wish to dwell on or even focus upon the recent Rev. Wright/Barak Obama controversy except to say that there are discussions that take place within Black America-discussions to which Senator Obama alluded-that are unlike discussions that take place among the majority of whites.

 

Because we are an internationalized people who have seen that underside of the American Dream, we tend to look beneath the so-called facts to uncover the real story. This sometimes lends itself to conspiracy theories, but not most of the time. The vast African American opposition to the Iraq war and occupation-from the beginning-was not accidental, but resulted from how we have seen the ACTUAL behavior of the USA both domestically and internationally. It is this fact that most white Americans refuse to understand. For most white Americans Iraq was, at worst, a horrible mistake. For African Americans it was entirely consistent with the Central American wars of the 1980s, US support for Apartheid South Africa, the Vietnam/Indochina War, the blockade of Cuba, US support for the various coups in Haiti... We tend to draw forbidden connections, those being, connections that are not deemed to be acceptable in polite company.

 

When King, and before him W.E.B. Dubois, suggested that the USA was the greatest purveyor of violence on this planet, this was not a statement that particularly surprised, frightened or antagonized Black America. Even if someone happened to disagree with it, it was considered a legitimate point of view. But it would surprise very few African Americans because, for one, our experience in the USA has been violent. Thus, for us, the notion of Al Qaeda terrorism being the worst thing that the world has ever seen lacks credibility when judged against our experiences in the slave trade; the subjugation of the Native Americans; Jim Crow segregation and the KKK; lynching; police violence...do I need to add anything else?

 

Nor would we see it as the worst violence-no matter how hideous it admittedly is-when we have watched entire countries destroyed by the policies of the USA, e.g., Haiti, Angola, Vietnam, El Salvador. When we have seen hundreds of thousands killed, such as in Indonesia in 1965 (and later in East Timor in 1975 and 1999), it is difficult for us to draw the conclusion that the war against terrorism is in any way sincere, despite Black America's own opposition to clerical fascism and terrorism.

 

The African American internationalists tend to draw conclusions by piecing together information based on a broad analysis derived from our experience with US racial capitalism. Our conclusions are generally correct, as our opposition to the Iraq war demonstrated. This does not mean that we are omniscient but rather that because of the oppression that we experience, we tend to ask the questions that need to be asked, sometimes facing dramatic consequences for doing so.

 

This internationalist impulse, for lack of a better term, is not entirely consistent, we should note. The Cold War purges and repression, mentioned earlier in my talk, skewed discussion and analysis within Black America. Matters of class, for instance, became more difficult to discuss because, to raise class tended to bring with it charges of communism. Our discourse focused all too often almost exclusively on race and national liberation. While this remains important, it blinded us to emerging realities both within Black America but also around the world.

 

To give an example, consider the aftermath of the anti-apartheid support movement in the USA. This movement was largely initiated by the CAA BEFORE the advent of apartheid when the struggle was for majority rule against the pre-apartheid system. The struggle to support South African freedom was a 40+ year struggle, as opposed to a struggle that suddenly arose in the 1980s. Nevertheless, during the 1980s my former organization, TransAfrica/TransAfrica Forum under the leadership of Randall Robinson played an exemplary role organizing and leading efforts in the USA.

 

For most African Americans, the support for the anti-apartheid struggle was the logical extension of the African American civil rights and Black Power movements. The enemy was clear and identifiable. The oppressed were as well. And, as increasing numbers of nations and social movements around the world came to support the South African national liberation struggle, anti-communism was discredited and it became easier for us to speak up and rise up.

 

Yet when democratic rule was won, a strategic challenge arose for Black America, and particularly for the internationalist current, be it civil rights, Pan Africanist, or socialist. The end of apartheid meant, for the most part, the end of white colonial and semi-colonial rule over Blacks. But it did not mean the end of oppression. However, our internationalism was largely shaped by a racial/anti-imperialist paradigm, that is, an analysis that tended to view anti-imperialism in racial terms as opposed to viewing it in terms of a broader struggle for social liberation.

 

When various non- or post-anti-colonial struggles emerged, particularly in Africa around workers rights, the oppression of women, sexual orientation or the environment, this did not and has not immediately resonated within Black America when the enemy is not identified as being white, or European. Rwanda is a sobering case in point, but so too is Haiti.

 

I want to focus on Haiti for a moment because the struggle around democracy in Haiti has been one that has, for the most part, not moved Black America in the post-Cold War world. While it is true that the first coup against President Aristide in '91 brought a reaction within Black America, again led by Randall Robinson and TransAfrica, I think that it is fair to say that Randall was unsettled by the lack of a mass response. In fact, Randall's famous hunger strike against US policy towards Haitian refugees was certainly noteworthy due to Randall's courage. But it was also noteworthy because it was the action of an individual in the absence of anything approaching a mass movement. As we found out in 2004, in the aftermath of the 2^nd coup against President Aristide, the challenge that Randall faced was not limited to that moment in time; it was a reflection of a new strategic situation for which much of the internationalist current within Black America was under-, if not unprepared to handle. Situations, such as Haiti, simply did not fit into a racial paradigm and, thus, became more difficult for many of us to identify with.

 

King and Malcolm, following in a proud tradition, sought to internationalize the Black Freedom struggle. For Malcolm this was the search for allies and the awakening of Black America to the fact that we are not alone on this planet. For King, there was the insistence that our struggle would never be complete if we did not challenge the violence, arrogance and inhumanity of US foreign policy, even with the victory we gained in the legislative realm.

 

These respective courses are as relevant today as they were when these giants elaborated them. We cannot, however, stop with their pronouncements or insights. We have to build on their work and face the realities of the 21^st century.

 

We are faced, today, with a global empire rooted in the USA. It is an empire stronger than any that has existed on this planet, yet one that suggests that it is not an empire at all, but almost a way of life. It does not exist, in the main, through direct colonies, but more through a combination of protectorates and neo-colonies, weaved together through a set of economic relations along with a vast array of military bases. It is an empire that will remove obstacles to its expansion, whether through economic intimidation, e.g., through loans, blockades, or through direct military might. Thomas Friedman's famous statement to the effect that one cannot have McDonald's without McDonnell-Douglas, and that there is no hidden hand without the hidden fist, makes this all too clear.

 

This empire can be described in terms of enforcing a system of "global apartheid," in that there is a dramatic separation in the lives of the upper 20% of the world's population from the bottom 80%. But this is not a classic racial or colonial situation, for sitting in power in many of the supposedly independent countries are people that look like us. In fact, in some cases, those sitting in power are individuals who, once upon a time, considered themselves revolutionaries, if not Marxists, supposedly part of the vanguard of international revolution. Some of these same leaders have made their peace with global capitalism even when they continue to fly the flag of their country's nationalism.

 

A narrow racial view of empire, and specifically of US foreign policy, provides us little way to understand this situation, but this is precisely the situation that we must address if we are to follow from King and Malcolm. Yet, just as the anti-apartheid struggle was, for Black America, an extension of our struggle for civil rights and black power, the current international situation and the construction of the US global empire speaks to DOMESTIC changes that Black America has been experiencing.

 

National liberation globally brought an end to direct colonial rule and, in the case of South Africa and other southern African states, an end to white minority rule. Our struggles in the USA against Jim Crow segregation brought an end to a heinous system and opened the possibility for an expansion of democracy. But in neither case was a consistent democracy won. New leading classes or elites emerged and benefited from the changed situation. I do not wish to minimize any of the advances that transpired post-national liberation because they have been significant, but the revolutionary impulse that existed in national liberation struggles as well as our own civil rights and black power movements was inconsistent and definitely incomplete.

 

When various groups, unleashed by these different struggles, arose to demand that national liberation and democracy benefit them, they were often met with silence, and in some cases outright repression. The banner of national liberation or Black freedom was complete, as far as the new leading groups were concerned. Nothing more needed to be added. The revolution was complete.

 

This turn of events, what Samir Amin calls the crisis of the national populist projects (in the global South), has been very disorienting. Old friends are not necessarily friends, and in some cases are outright opponents or enemies. And people among our old enemies are sometimes our friends. Indeed, it is very complicated. Because, at the end of the day, the enemy of our freedom is no longer as identifiable as s/he once was.

 

I believe that King was coming to see this toward the end of his life and he found it very disconcerting. Here in the USA, he recognized that the Black freedom struggle had to fuse with the economic justice and global justice struggles if it were to succeed. Those who opposed him, in many cases, believed that with the victory over Jim Crow, we now had our chance at the American Dream. King rebutted this, countering that we could not integrate into an oppressive system whether that system was oppressing Blacks in Louisiana, or yellow people in Laos. This stand alienated King from many of his former allies, a fact that mainstream history often chooses to ignore.

 

Our challenge today, then, is to reinvent internationalism and international solidarity among the oppressed. To do this means that we have to understand that the challenges that we are facing here with neo-liberal globalization have their counterpart in the suffering of people around the world. We can see it very directly with something like NAFTA which has destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs in the USA, but also destroyed Mexican agriculture and the public sector, resulting in the migrations of hundreds of thousands of people first into Mexico's cities and then north to the USA.

 

Our challenge today is to understand that oppression does not just come in the white face. Women being raped in South Africa are not mainly being raped by white men. AIDS in Africa is not mainly being spread by white men. While we can tie each of these to imperialism in the last instance, we have to recognize that national liberation alone, to borrow from Frantz Fanon, is simply not enough; nor has been our freedom from Jim Crow.

 

The internationalist current within Black America arose first in our struggle against slavery; it then evolved during our struggle against Jim Crow and the global South's struggle against colonialism. It has now entered a brave new world of the struggle against neo-liberal globalization. While our first duty is and will be to challenge the US to follow the path of a democratic foreign policy, making the US a global friend rather than a global bully, and in that sense we are mounting a challenge to the prerogative of empire, we have another global responsibility. That responsibility is to break the silence around the international struggles for consistent democracy. We must break the silence around the persecution of women by right-wing Islamists who caricaturize the freedom of women as something that is allegedly antithetical to Islam. We must break the silence around the suppression of workers in Zimbabwe who have consistently fought against individuals and policies that once had the favor of the IMF and World Bank even when the flag of revolutionary nationalism was being flown. We must break the silence when leaders in the global South who look remarkably like us, get down on their knees and demand that they be accepted into the global empire as partners in the oppression of their own people.

 

This new role has been and WILL CONTINUE TO BE very uncomfortable precisely because it breaks from the old paradigm. Yet this is the role and the path that we are destined to travel if we are to be true to the trajectory of the best elements of the Black Freedom struggle and its relationship to global democracy and global justice.

 

Thank you.

 

Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a longtime labor and international activist and the former President and chief executive officer of TransAfrica Forum, a national non-profit organization organizing, educating and advocating for policies in favor of the peoples of Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. He has traveled on human rights delegations to Haiti, South Africa, Ireland and many parts of Latin America and Africa. Fletcher is currently a Senior Scholar for the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, Director of the Field Services and Education Department of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), and editor for the Black Commentator. Fletcher is a graduate of Harvard University and has authored numerous articles published in a variety of newspapers and magazines. He is co-author (with Fernando Gapasin) of the forthcoming book on the crisis of organized labor, Solidarity Divided, to be published by the University of California Press in late spring 2008.

 

This speech was delivered at the University of Illinois at Chicago on April 3, 2008, as part of a speaker series, "African American PeaceMakers as Agents For Change" to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Reverend Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968 and the 41st anniversary of his famous Riverside Church speech of April 4, 1967, entitled "Beyond Vietnam: Time to Break the Silence," when he spoke out against the war in Vietnam.